Asana at Piper Sandler Conference: AI Studio and Growth Strategy

On Wednesday, 10 September 2025, Asana (NYSE:ASAN) participated in the Piper Sandler 4th Annual Growth Frontiers Conference, where the company’s leadership outlined strategic initiatives focused on AI integration and growth acceleration. While Asana’s AI Studio promises to enhance customer workflows and future-proof its business model, challenges such as SEO traffic declines were also addressed. The company is committed to expanding its product offerings and optimizing operations under the new CEO’s leadership.

Key Takeaways

• Asana’s AI Studio aims to future-proof the business with a consumption-based model.
• New CEO Dan emphasizes customer engagement and growth reinvigoration.
• The company is addressing SEO traffic declines by diversifying marketing channels.
• Operating margins have improved by 16% year-over-year.
• Asana plans to leverage AI to enhance Collaborative Work Management.

Financial Results

• Gross Margin: Asana maintains a strong gross margin of 90%, aligning with best-in-class software businesses.
• Operating Margin: Significant potential for expansion through revenue growth and cost optimization.
• Geographic Mix: The company is shifting its workforce to lower-cost regions, such as Warsaw, to optimize expenses.

Operational Updates

• AI Studio: The product has doubled in success sequentially and is now accessible to the entire customer base. It focuses on enhancing workflows with context awareness and smart templates.
• Teammates Launch: Scheduled for fall, this new feature will facilitate multi-step workflows, integrating both human and AI interactions.
• Marketing Strategy: In response to a decline in SEO traffic, Asana has shifted its marketing efforts to platforms like Reddit, Quora, YouTube, and podcasts, which have shown higher conversion rates.

Future Outlook

• CEO’s Vision: Dan, the new CEO, is focused on meeting 100 customers in 100 days to drive engagement and growth. He aims to improve unit economics and reinvigorate growth.
• AI and CWM: Asana plans to showcase the essential nature of Collaborative Work Management (CWM) in a world where AI and humans collaborate, positioning itself as a leader in this space.
• Talent Expansion: The company is expanding its R&D talent pool in Warsaw to diversify its workforce geographically and economically.

Q&A Highlights

• Early Adoption: Tech companies have been early adopters of Asana’s solutions, with AI Studio gaining traction in large enterprise conversations.
• Logo Retention: Despite experiencing downgrade pressure in seat subscriptions, Asana is retaining customer logos and securing long-term renewals.
• Security Focus: Emphasis on responsible AI with robust security and governance controls, ensuring trust and compliance.

Asana’s strategic initiatives and leadership changes highlight its commitment to growth and innovation in the evolving tech landscape. For more details, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Piper Sandler 4th Annual Growth Frontiers Conference:

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: Pardon?

Aziz Zeria, Head of FP&A, Asana: You say after lunch, they don’t mess around.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: Yeah, exactly.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Good afternoon. Thank you. My name is Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research here at Piper Sandler. Excited to have Asana join us in Nashville again. Thank you guys so much for joining us. We have Sonalee, the CFO, and Aziz, the Head of FP&A. Thank you both and welcome to Nashville.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: Thank you for hosting us. We’re delighted to be here. We were out on Broadway last night, making the most of our surroundings.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: It’s a hard one to miss.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: Yeah.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Certainly one that’s busy any night of the week.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: It is exactly.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Three topics I wanted to kind of cover in this session today, fireside chat. One, as we think about data architecture as a kind of a competitive advantage in this AI era. Two, business momentum. Three, this opportunity really around AI and Asana AI Studio. Maybe let’s start with Asana AI Studio. As you think about the opportunity around Asana AI Studio, clearly very early days.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: Yes.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: But.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: Thank you for saying that.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: It did double sequentially.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: More than double.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: More than double sequentially. Maybe walk us through some of the early drivers, early indicators of where the interest is there.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: Yeah, sure. Thanks for starting with Asana AI Studio because we couldn’t be more excited about really establishing ourselves as a multi-product company and Asana AI Studio being that first new product to bring us into this era of becoming multi-product. What gets us so excited about Asana AI Studio is that not only is it future-proofing our business model in many ways, when you think about the seat-based versus consumption-based model, we also feel like we are so uniquely positioned to be able to use AI to augment our customers’ experiences. That really is through our systems architecture, through the Work Graph, which you’ve heard us talk about for many years. It’s this system of record where at any given time, you know who is doing what by when. It’s that context awareness that makes the AI or Asana AI Studio so valuable to customers who roll it out.

We’ve seen this across the piece. I think traditionally and historically, where we’ve really shined is in certain areas like marketing and the project management office. What we’re finding with Asana AI Studio is that customers are actually finding use cases for Asana AI Studio over and above and beyond what Asana has typically been known for. We also think this proliferates the relevance of Asana and really showcases our ability to go wall to wall and be that horizontal platform.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: As you think about the opportunity and as you think about the threat, my thesis from day one has always been question everything. I say that because the pace of AI is changing so fast. One thesis that we had was like, oh, the workflow companies, they’re well insulated. Now AI is changing some of the workflows. As you think about being a workflow work management tool, how does a changing workflow good for the business and how does a changing workflow maybe challenge some of the opportunities that you have? It’s a great question and it’s something we think about a lot. AI Studio really started with focusing on those customers that were early adopters of rules and building workflows on Asana, really turbocharging that. That’s not the vast majority of our base.

The vast majority of our base does not build custom rules and have that kind of builder mentality. We see AI Studio as a way of bringing workflows or AI Studio to existing workflows and helping our customers automate and set up workflows across their business. Their workflows may change and AI Studio is intended to help them with that changing dynamic. It’s easy to build workflows. It’s easy to adapt workflows. With the introduction of teammates later on this fall, it’s easy to insert a teammate to help you build the workflow, to be an agent inside the workflow, to have reasoning and decision-making capabilities within the context of the Work Graph, which is really that context of where boundaries, security, governance around that.

We feel we’re well oriented in a world where you’re using AI Studio to turbocharge existing workflows or to help you set up and adapt to changing workflows. We’ve seen that in our customer base, especially as we roll out AI Studio more broadly to our smaller customers as well. You mentioned teammates as something that’s coming. Maybe we’ll double click into the AI Studio roadmap. Teammates is coming. You talked about the AI Studio more than doubling sequentially here. What are the other either product catalysts or new capabilities that you think could be triggers to drive broader adoption? I think it’s AI Studio started with focusing on our base and those that were builders. We just released a few weeks ago AI Studio for self-service. About 40% of our customer base we acquired through our self-service motion. Now 100% of our customer base has accessibility to AI Studio.

Now it’s early days with self-serve. It’s only been a few weeks, but we’ve already seen initial strong adoption in those first few weeks. We’re excited about self-serve and bringing Asana AI Studio to our smaller customers. That’s a key element of our roadmap. I think the second one would be smart workflows. We have a template gallery that we’ve created of out-of-the-box workflows from data intake to vendor onboarding to HR onboarding to campaign management and content creation workflows. Allowing our customers out of the box with a few clicks to be up and running with a workflow that could be used straight out of the box or adapted, but giving them that initial template and scaffolding to work off of. We’ve seen good adoption there. That’s a huge focus of ours, going deeper and broader with those workflows. It’s exposing us to new workflows and new ICPs.

One of them, which is really interesting, is HR onboarding. We haven’t been thought of as an HR or people tool, but we have this really cool workflow around HR onboarding and we’re seeing good adoption of that. It’s exposing us to new buyer types, the new ICPs. The third leg of that tool, which will be this fall, as we mentioned, is teammates. Asana AI Studio is really focused on those multi-step workflows where there’s a lot of human and agent interaction and engagement. Teammates can help you build that workflow or it can act alongside the human to step into that multi-step loop with reasoning and decision-making capabilities. We’re super excited about that and having that drive consumption and adoption of the Asana AI Studio platform.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: That comes out in the fall.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: In the fall, wanted to touch on, and this is a multi-part question. You always have to have multi-part questions, right? That’s super important.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: We’ll pay attention.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: You’re relatively new. Aziz, relatively new.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: That’s the same time tape.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: You now have a new CEO. It was very clear Dan was passionate and excited on the call. Part one of the question is really more around he talked about this big unlock, putting AI agents on rails. One, maybe explain what that means and what he means. Two, how have you worked with Dan? What’s it like working with Dan? Maybe share a little bit more about kind of your personal experiences and what Dan’s focused on and how you’re interacting with Dan.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: Yeah, sure. I’ll start with the interacting with Dan. I just actually got off a call with him just now. It’s been great. It’s early days. He’s a month in. I’m a year into my tenure. It’s been officially a year. I think you’re 10 months in. He operates with a lot of speed and velocity. He makes decisions quickly, which I like. I think it’s a breath of fresh air at Asana. I think he is really good at a lot of the things that Dustin didn’t like to do, which is also really good. Dustin is very cerebral and extremely thoughtful. He moves more slowly in some ways because he wants to make sure everything is aligned and perfect. Dan comes in and he’s more of an intuitive leader. I think he’s pushing us in certain ways, certainly on the go-to-market side, to think about things differently.

I think that’s really good. The other thing is this customer focus he’s brought. I think Dustin historically, meeting customers wasn’t the part of the job he loved. He loved innovating. He loved working with the engineers. He loved working with product. He loved pontificating about what the future would look like for Collaborative Work Management and software in general. Dan loves meeting our customers. He set himself this goal of wanting to meet 100 customers in 100 days. I don’t think he’s going to quite get there, but he’s not going to be far off. He’s already gone to Europe. He’s gone all over the U.S., meeting customers of all shapes and sizes. Some customers that are extremely well adopted, some customers that aren’t well adopted because he wants to hear from both.

I think bringing that customer point of view into our product sessions, ensuring that product-market fit, especially as we roll out new products at a higher velocity because he’s a high-velocity guy. He wants to move quick. I think these are all things that we will benefit from a lot. The other thing is he’s going deep with Aziz and I on the unit economics of various routes to market. Where do we want to double down? Where should we perhaps be using partners or the channel more? Historically, we haven’t used the channel very much, but it’s an opportunity. He’s looking for all these potential untapped levers. He’s very growth-oriented. I’ve been here a year and you’ve seen the margins go up by 16% year over year.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Thank you.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: You’re welcome. There’s more to come, a lot more to come. Dan is really focused on, like, how do we get that growth to reinflect? What are the drivers to repairing NRR, which has been an issue for us in the headwind? I think Dan would be very disappointed if we weren’t able to reinflect growth. He’s very focused in his first, I guess it’s been almost two months now, 60 days, on what the path to reinflecting growth will look like.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Super helpful for outsiders to kind of hear that inside, kind of what’s happening in real time. Aziz, tough question for you. You get the agent on rails. What is Dan passionate about that? He used that line a couple of times. What does he mean by having an agent on rails? Yeah.

Aziz Zeria, Head of FP&A, Asana: I think this is where I think the definition of that is really the context of where security, governance, compliance, and that underpinning of the Work Graph. We’re not just trying to put agents into any different context. It’d be jack of all trades. These are contexts that we’re.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: Not letting them loose.

Aziz Zeria, Head of FP&A, Asana: Not letting them loose. These are context aware within the confines of the Work Graph, which as Sonalee says, is really the system of record of how work gets done in an organization. That makes the agents that much more powerful. The results are more accurate. The cost per output, the cost per the ROI equation, it’s not just the returns, but the cost per return equation is amplified because of that. That’s super important. While it’s early, we’ve had really strong traction in places like Germany and in places like EMEA where they have very strict and high standards that are brought about by their AI councils. That security, that governance, that context aware is really differentiating Asana. It’s something that was near and dear to Dustin’s heart from day one, making sure that AI is responsible and the security and the governance around it.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: The controls are there.

Aziz Zeria, Head of FP&A, Asana: The controls are there, and that is really standing out in our enterprise conversations across the globe.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: To give an example, for the way I use Asana AI Studio, obviously the work that I do and Aziz and I do, we have a lot of confidential information. We wouldn’t want one of my colleagues who has an AI agent who’s working with a teammate in marketing to be able to come into my area or scope. That is what we mean by on rails. We make sure they stay on the rails, and they’re only doing what they’re meant to be doing. This is something that’s potentially for other enterprise and companies that serve enterprises that are trying to sell AI into them, has been a barrier to adoption, making sure that that control environment is there. We have some of the largest, and there was one very large tech company that we recently signed a three-year $100 million TCB deal with.

Let me tell you, the bar to become a foundational software for them, we’re one of only a handful of software companies that are foundational to this hyperscaler. The bar was extremely high. Having that very regimented, and again, Dustin’s kind of the foundation of what all of our Collaborative Work Management and Work Graph was built on is around safety, controls, privacy. That couldn’t have been higher with that customer.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about another debate in the industry, which is really around this whole AEO versus SEO, AI, you know, engine optimization, search engine optimization, clearly impacting the traffic trends. There’s a debate around how is that going to impact the product-led growth company. What are you seeing so far, and what’s the counter to a slowdown in SEO traffic?

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: Yeah, great question. We did talk about this at our earnings. Actually, if you look back at some of the transcripts, I was starting to talk about this even before our last quarterly earnings when we attended a couple of conferences after our June earnings, because we were starting to see it from probably about May. It was brought to my attention by our, you know, we do a weekly demand gen meeting and a weekly forecast meeting. We saw a top of funnel, which for a PLG business is really important. We saw the traffic declining. We were trying to understand what was happening. It soon became obvious that there were some changes in the dynamics of the way people search. We very quickly got ahead of it. I have to credit our COO, who’s not here today, Anne Raimondi, she was on the call.

Her and her team, her go-to-market team, started putting in place things to mitigate the dynamics we were seeing. One of the interesting kind of second derivative consequences of this drop in top of funnel was actually we ended up seeing better conversion. We were seeing higher intent traffic in that top of funnel. Some of the traffic that we were losing or that was never coming in the first place was they were probably never going to buy Asana anyway. That was an interesting dynamic and one that we’ve since doubled down on and capitalized on. The second thing is we did see that we wanted to change the customer experience on our website because, again, people search really differently today. We have diverted some of our marketing spend to different channels. We’ve changed some of the content on our website to be more experiential, more webinar.

Some of the channels that we’re using more today than we were a quarter ago are Reddit, Quora, YouTube, like more video format. There’s one that I’m forgetting. Oh, podcasts. We’re using more podcasts now. We have diverted some of our marketing dollars, but I think the important thing is that we now feel like we have a handle on the dynamics at the top of funnel. We know what the kind of new normal on conversion is. We feel like it’s adequately captured in the way we’ve guided for the quarter and for the rest of the year.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: I know tech has been a double-edged sword. Early on, being a Silicon Valley-based company, you had a ton of new tech companies growing really fast. It was a super helpful tailwind to drive the growth early on. That slowed over the last couple of years and has been a bit of a drag on the growth. My question is, are there any catalysts where maybe that tech business could actually re-accelerate? We are seeing a lot more AI startups. I don’t know if that’s an opportunity or not.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: Yeah, we have the labs of large customers as well.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Okay. Walk me through that tech vertical that’s been a drag. Is there anything you see where actually tech can stabilize or maybe even improve again?

Aziz Zeria, Head of FP&A, Asana: Yeah, great question. Tech was kind of where we started and they were early adopters of Asana, right? They’re often early adopters of new and cool technology, especially when it drives productivity gains. We’re seeing that same emergence of trend with Asana AI Studio. We’ve seen strong adoption in our tech cohort and strong interest of Asana AI Studio. Some very large tech companies were part of our early beta and key to providing feedback and evolving the product. That can be a key catalyst. Right now, Asana AI Studio is playing a really important part in conversations with tech companies at renewal. Those who maybe they’ve reduced headcount or haven’t grown headcount as fast, we’re talking about reducing seat footprint. We now have that mitigation of saying, hey, okay, you may want to reduce your seat footprint from X to Y, but why don’t you adopt Asana AI Studio?

These are the benefits that can drive, and we’re able to mitigate that downgrade, in some cases fully offset and actually create an expansion event. The adoption of multi-product is a key lever there. I think the second is we are seeing logo churn improve across the board and in our tech cohort. While we are seeing downgrade pressure in seats, we are retaining the logo. As some of the pressures subside that are keeping tech companies from expanding at more rapid rates on headcount, we feel that if and when they do that, we’re well situated to grow back with them. I think that’s number two. Number three is we’re not seeing second bites of the apple per se on downgrade. It’s kind of a cohort, maybe they overbought or they haven’t expanded as fast and they downgrade.

We’re not seeing that cohort, and the next time they come up for renewal, downgrade us again. Many times they’re signing up for long-term renewals when they’re downgrading. There’s visibility, and we’re not seeing that second bite of the apple. That gives us comfort as well. I think it’s those three factors: adopting Asana AI Studio and our add-ons as an expansion path, we’re retaining the logos, and as things rebound, hopefully macro-wise, and they expand again, we’re well situated to expand on seats. That downgrade pressure, we’re not seeing it come again and again and again. That’s this repeating impact on the same set of customers.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Totally. I know this is near and dear to your heart. You’ve driven a meaningful leverage in the operating margin model here in your first year. Let’s think about the art of the possible. Let’s say you get to $2 billion in revenue. What’s possible from an operating margin standpoint for a $2 billion scale business with 90% gross margin?

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: Yeah, thanks for calling up a 90% gross margin because I have to say when I first sat down with Dustin and we were talking about like what could be, like what’s the financial profile of this business, you know, starting with those 90% gross margins was like he had me at hello, right? Our R&D and our sales and marketing expense is still like, thank you for saying we’ve made great progress. I think we have, but it’s still very elevated relative to where it could be or should be if we were $2 billion or $5 billion. I think you put $5 billion in the practice question.

Aziz Zeria, Head of FP&A, Asana: I did.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: Why stop at $2, Brent? When you can have $5. I think, you know, there is no reason why we could not be in line with best-in-class software businesses that have 90% growth margins. Some of the things that we’re doing where I think we’ve only skimmed the surface and there’s a lot more to go for is, you know, changing the geographic mix of our headcount. When I first arrived at Asana, 90%+ of our people were in high-cost cities and mostly New York and San Francisco, and engineering especially. We’ve already started the process, and that’s part of what’s been driving the margin improvement. We’ve started the process of doing more and more R&D hiring in Warsaw. We’re getting great people there. We’re getting great talent. They’re doing great things, including working on Asana AI Studio.

We even now have started hiring leaders there, team leaders, which is great for, you know, making larger bets in certain areas of our tech roadmap. You need that leadership there too. I think, you know, there’s more for us to do that on, you know, the sales and marketing side of things, on the G&A side of things, and then on the marketing side of things. That’s where Dan brings great experience. We’re already going deep with him on the efficacy of certain marketing channels. Could we, you know, with this 40% self-serve business, do a lot more on the PLG side where we pull back some of the marketing dollars, but actually get better conversion? Like, hey, ho, this just happened, right? I think that there’s more opportunities to do that. Even if you don’t do anything incremental, and I’m not saying we won’t, we will.

We’re going to look for incremental things. If you just hold kind of the OpEx envelope flattish, if you continue to grow even where consensus is now, or even where I guided, you get that multi-year margin expansion. If we can re-accelerate growth, which of course we believe we can, I wouldn’t be sitting here if I didn’t believe we can, you get that amplified. There is significant, significant potential here.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Last question, we’ll end with 30 seconds. What’s the one thing that you would flag to investors that you’re going to be most excited about talking about Nashville 2026?

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: Okay, should I go first and then you go?

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Yeah, go for it.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: Okay, a year from now, I think you will all see why CWM, Collaborative Work Management, goes from a really nice-to-have category to a must-have, mission-critical in a world where AI and humans need to collaborate with each other. We are that platform. We will own that space.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Interesting.

Aziz Zeria, Head of FP&A, Asana: Yeah, I would echo that and say it’s, you know, Asana AI Studio and AI Teammates bringing Collaborative Work Management into their own and being able to share all the traction that we’re driving and the new use cases we’re enabling through Asana AI Studio. That’s super exciting.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Awesome.

Aziz Zeria, Head of FP&A, Asana: We’re back on Broadway next year.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Thank you guys so much for joining us in Nashville. Very insightful.

Sonalee Parekh, CFO, Asana: Thank you. Take care.

Brent Bracelin, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Thank you.

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